23rd April 2013

Autunno
After Cy Twombly
The sadness breaks tonight it breaks at sevenit cheats all tender efforts to get evenit remembers what I did not we were Autumnand the way it falls away and gives to auburnw… Read article

25th January 2013

Lodger. It sounds a sad thing. Still, whenever talk turns to houses and someone asks if I own, it seems best to own up. I am a lodger. Not a tenant or lease-holder or anything else, but a lodger, rent… Read article

18th October 2012

It might as well start with a queue for the Gents: but it starts, when it starts, with a man in a chair. A thick-set man in an armchair, with grey beard and unkempt hair, who’s lowered through a tra… Read article

16th July 2012

As soon as I’m shown into the clinic, the specialist wants to know why I’m there. She’s had a long letter from my GP, she says, about some half-remembered symptoms I first suffered aged six – … Read article

8th January 2012

At school I was bullied for being Jewish. Sure, I didn’t have to put up with the animal noises that my father had to stomach at a minor boarding school in Hertfordshire in the 1960s. But ‘Jew’ o… Read article

14th November 2011

Packs of men, women, and children are rounding the corner of Albion Street with their hands full of fire. The blazing torches they clutch look like matchsticks made for a giant and their flames burn i… Read article

9th October 2011

I have started learning poems by heart again. The first time round, I was six and under orders from Mrs Russell, a primary-school teacher who sometimes said ‘bugger’ loudly in the classroom and wh… Read article